For many years, Caribbean countries have been vulnerable to the environmental impacts due to climate change; hence, Belize has faced challenges that has led it to made significant efforts to respond to climate change. As part of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the country recognizes the urgency of being prepared to build capacity to expand knowledge resources and develop resilience to current issues. Despite of the fact that considerable funding is available to support the climate actions throughout the world, one main priority for Belize is to access and disbursement to those climate finances at the national level to the country, as well as to implement its Climate Change Action Plan and the National Climate Resilience Investment Plan. As a result of the needs, this Readiness project, which is leading and coordinated by the Government of Belize through the National Designed Authority (NDA) of the Green Climate Found (GCF) and the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), is going to strengthen its capacities to manage and mobilize climate finances to achieve the goals related to national strategies.

The Readiness project is aimed to support the country by strengthening its capacities to effectively access, manage, disburse, and monitor climate financing, and facilitate the preparation of national institutions to administer resources from the GCF. Based on the previous efforts, activities implemented helped to identify procedures for nominating national entities seeking to accreditation of the GFC. Thus, this project is also looking for developing and facilitating preparation for those national entities wanting to meet GFC accreditation in different areas such as environmental, social safeguards (ESS), the GCF gender policy, and project development.

This project comprises three main outcomes:

• Outcome 1: Institutional Capacity and coordination mechanism strengthened to govern and coordinate climate finance
• Outcome 2: County programming process: Stakeholder engaged in a consultative processes; Gender issues considered in climate finance programming
• Outcome 3: Direct access to climate finance: Direct Access Entity’s (DAE) Work Programme alignment with Country Programme

Furthermore, these important activities under the Readiness project are objectives to support and provide strengthen in the Belizean entities in a significantly way to respond to the current needs in the region and be integrated to the local efforts to the climate finance.